Customizing Visual Studio Search Results

2010-12-24

Display of search results in Visual Studio has been remarkably primitive despite numerous improvements in other areas. Eclipse, in contrast has added some compelling features such as clustered results grouped by packages and classes and the ability to prune results. Now, simplicity has its place, sometimes the simple list of text makes it easier to scan.

Previously, I described how to retrieve search results programmatically. Here, I show a proof-of-concept on how to customize the look and feel of search results in Visual Studio:

I’ve written a proof-of-concept visual studio extension that will highlight search results that you have visited. Unlike other customization attempts that modify registry settings to shorten file paths, here, we can actually change the visual tree.